A Widow in Paradise & Suburban Secrets

by Donna Birdsell

  Guy looked miserable. Defeated.

  Dannie slid a hand over his and gave it a squeeze. “So basically, this is all because of a boob job?”

  Guy laughed and shook his head. “I guess you could say that. I’ve been looking for Lisa for months. This Cuatro Blanco thing was my only lead.”

  “But why do you think Roger had anything to do with this?” she asked.

  “There are too many coincidences,” Guy said. “Their affair. The fact that he…died in Cuatro Blanco. The fact that they both knew Jimmy Duke. And now the counterfeit money.”

  “Maybe Jimmy got to both of them,” she said. “Maybe he made them disappear.”

  “I thought of that, but it didn’t make sense. Why would Lisa have stolen the money from the safe if she didn’t know she was going to disappear? And why would her mother be mailing packages to Cuatro Blanco?”

  Dannie finished her wine and poured another glass, pacing the kitchen. “So the only person you know who has had any contact with Lisa since she left was her mother?”

  “Yes. Lisa tells her mother everything. I’m sure she knew exactly what was going on.”

  “Have you gone back to her mother’s house? Looked for more evidence?”

  “No. But I still have the key from Lisa’s key chain. I could get in there anytime I want.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?”

  THEY PLANNED A STAKEOUT for the following evening, when Guy knew that Lisa’s mother, Rose Hoffstetter, would leave the house for her regular Thursday-night bingo game and they could use Guy’s key to get in.

  Guy arrived early to Dannie’s house and helped her clean up the dinner dishes, commenting, of course, on the lack of a vegetable.

  “We had ketchup on the hot dogs,” Dannie said. “That counts as a vegetable.”

  “Says who?”

  “The U.S. government.”

  Dannie’s regular babysitter couldn’t make it, but the girl had recommended a friend, Kristi, who showed up fifteen minutes late. Not a good omen.

  Kristi had an earring through her eyebrow, a stud in her nose and she chewed her gum with her mouth open. She looked bored as Dannie explained the rules of the house and the bedtime procedure.

  “Betsy and Richard can have pretzels before bed, but not ice cream. They’ll get too hyper. The twins get a little bit of yogurt, or some grapes. I’ve cut some up and put them in the fridge.”

  Kristi cracked her gum. “So what should I do with them? This is, like, my first time babysitting.”

  Dannie bit the inside of her cheek. “Well, there’s a movie in the DVD player. Erin and Emma have some wooden puzzles in that drawer over there. They go to bed at seven-thirty. Betsy and Richard can stay up until eight-fifteen. Their pajamas are in the dryer, so they should be dry by bedtime.”

  Kristi pulled her gum into a long string, and twirled it back into her mouth with her tongue.

  What a talent.

  “My cell phone number is on the table,” Dannie continued, “along with a list of emergency numbers. Okay?”

  Kristi shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “Do you have any questions?”

  Kristi took the gum out of her mouth. “Like, how much do you pay? I’m saving up for a tattoo.”

  Dannie felt a twitch forming in her left eyelid. “Guy…?”

  He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the door. “Come on. It’ll be fine. She can call you on the cell if she needs you. We’ll be less than five miles away.”

  Dannie glanced over her shoulder. Kristi was twirling her gum around her finger, looking at the kids as if she was trying to figure out how to turn them off.

  Dannie knew from experience there was no switch for that.

  “We’ll take your car,” Guy said when they reached the driveway. “Rose would know mine.”

  Dannie tossed him the keys and slid into the passenger side, sitting on a half-melted chocolate bar. She peeled the wrapper off her butt and stuffed it into a plastic grocery bag on the floor.

  “Not to sound rude,” Guy said, “but do you ever clean this thing?”

  Dannie pulled the seat belt over her lap. “Roger used to handle that. I guess I haven’t really thought about it.”

  “Maybe it’s time.” He unstuck a piece of gum from the gearshift and threw it into the bag.

  They’d just pulled out of the driveway when Dannie’s cell phone rang.

  Kristi popped her gum into the phone. “Um, like, who did you say couldn’t have ice cream? Because the boy is saying he can have some, but I thought you said he couldn’t.”

  “That’s right. Richard is not allowed to have ice cream. Betsy isn’t, either. They can have pretzels or an apple.”

  “’Kay. See ya.”

  “The babysitter?” Guy asked when Dannie hung up.

  “If you can call her that.” Dannie resisted the urge to demand he turn the car around and take her back home. She sighed. “At least she didn’t give Richard ice cream. He’d be up all night.”

  A few minutes later Guy drove slowly past a small white house with green shutters.

  “That’s it.”

  Lights blazed in the kitchen, the living room and a bedroom upstairs. A cat sat tucked up into itself on a windowsill overlooking the street.

  “Looks like she’s still home,” Dannie said.

  “Huh. Must be running late. Bingo starts in ten minutes, and she likes to get there early so she can get a beer and a plate of hot wings.”

  “Beer and wings? Where is this bingo game, in the back room of a bar?”

  “Close. At the firehouse.”

  Guy pulled the van up to the curb a few doors down from Rose’s house, and cut the engine.

  “What now?” Dannie said.

  “We wait.”

  They sat in silence for a few minutes, staring at the house, with no sign of movement from Rose.

  “Can we at least listen to the radio?” Dannie said.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  Guy turned the key in the ignition just enough to start the power in the car. Dannie tuned the radio in to the eighties station. REO Speedwagon’s “Keep on Lovin’ You” drifted from the speakers.

  “I love this song,” Dannie said. “I had my first kiss to this song.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Guy said. “Tell me about it.”

  Dannie leaned back in her seat. “I was almost thirteen, and I was at my first boy-girl birthday party. It was the middle of summer. Really hot. We were dancing in the basement, and all the lights were out except for one of those tabletop disco lights. This song came on, and the boy I’d had a crush on all year asked me to dance. I couldn’t believe my luck.”

  Guy leaned back in his seat, turning his head toward hers. “Go on.”

  “The heat was terrible in the basement. He’d unbuttoned his shirt, and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. He pulled me close. I don’t think we were dancing really. We weren’t moving, just sort of rocking back and forth. And then he leaned down and kissed me.”

  Guy reached out and gave one of her curls a tug, letting it spring back into place. “Did you like it?”

  “Are you kidding? I was too scared to like it.”

  “What were you scared of?”

  “I don’t know. Love, maybe. Or lust. Both were way beyond my control at that point.”

  “And what about now?” He slid his fingers into her hair, burying them in her curls.

  “I…” The words caught in her throat. She fought for a breath, but it seemed as if the air had been stolen by the rising temperature in the car.

  Guy touched his lips to hers, softly, tentatively. So much like that first kiss, her throat constricted. She closed her eyes. She could see the spinning lights. Hear the music echoing off the painted cinder-block walls…

  “I guess they’re both still way beyond my control,” she whispered.

  Guy groaned, crushing her chest against his, running a hand over her back, her hip, her thigh. The melted chocolate on her backside.


  They struggled to get closer, blocked by the center console and the steering wheel. Guy smacked his head against the window as he climbed into the passenger seat. He groaned again, probably in pain, but it still managed to turn her on.

  Everything about him turned her on, and not just physically. Spending time with him had an addictive quality. A little bit of Guy was never enough. And it was getting dangerous.

  Dannie lifted her hips and twisted around until he was sitting on the seat and she was straddling him. Before she knew it, he’d peeled off her jacket and blouse, and was working on the button of her jeans.

  “Died in Your Arms” by Cutting Crew came on the radio and Dannie thought there might not be a truer song for that moment. Her body fit against Guy’s as if they were two parts of a puzzle, separated only by a pink T-shirt and an eighth of an inch of denim.

  She moved her hands over his face, touching his eyelids, his crooked nose, his lips. She slid against him and pulled up his shirt, touching her bare stomach to his.

  “You are so sexy,” he breathed. “I want you so bad, it hurts.”

  “That’s probably the door handle.”

  He held her face in his hands. “I’m not joking, Dannie. I feel things for you I haven’t felt in a long, long time.”

  “You’re just nostalgic from the music,” she said, pulling away.

  But he wouldn’t let her off so easily. His arms circled her waist and he pulled her back to him. “The music has nothing to do with it.”

  “Guy, we can’t do this.”

  “Why? What’s stopping us?”

  “How about the fact that we’re in a car outside your mother-in-law’s house, trying to get information about your wife and my dead husband?”

  Guy’s arms fell away from her body. “You’re right. We shouldn’t be doing this in a car.”

  “That’s what you got out of that? We shouldn’t be doing it in a car? What about the other stuff?”

  Guy picked her blouse off the driver’s seat and held it up to her. She slipped it on, and he buttoned it as he spoke. “Look, Lisa left me. She stole from me, knowing full well that I’d be in deep trouble because of it. Jimmy Duke is not a man you mess with.”

  “I realize that, but you’re still married.”

  “Marriage isn’t just a piece of paper. It’s the commitment behind the paper that counts. Doesn’t seem to me like Lisa was very committed. Roger, either, for that matter.”

  “Roger was a good husband.”

  “Yeah? You didn’t seem too surprised when I told you he was cheating on you with my wife. I’m guessing it wasn’t the first time.”

  She shook her head. “But there are other measures of a marriage. He was a great father.”

  “That’s admirable. But what does that have to do with you and me? Are you going to be loyal to a man after he’s been gone nine months because he was a crappy husband but a good father? What about what you want?”

  She was silent.

  “Do you want me, Dannie? Or am I just in this thing alone?”

  How could she answer that?

  There were so many things to consider. Too many things. She wasn’t the kind of woman who had idle affairs, especially not with married men. And guy was still married, whether Lisa had left him or not.

  Roger was only the third man she’d ever been in love with in her life, after two long-term boyfriends, one in high school and one in college.

  And then there was Lyle.

  If she hooked up with Guy, it would surely cause a rift in her friendship with Lyle. And she cared about him, she truly did.

  But you don’t want to have sex with him, the devil on her shoulder whispered. Isn’t it time you let yourself have a little bit of fun?

  Before she could commit to anything, her cell phone rang.

  She exhaled, both in relief and frustration. “Yes?”

  “Okay, like, now they’re fighting. What should I do?” Kristi sounded decidedly less cool than she had twenty minutes ago.

  “Send Richard to his room and stick Betsy in the corner for five minutes. Let the twins listen to a Sesame Street CD while they’re having their snack.”

  “Right. Okay. Like, this is a lot harder than taking care of my neighbor’s guinea pigs.”

  “No kidding?” Dannie gave Kristi a few words of encouragement and flipped the phone shut.

  “Now I’m worried,” she said. “Maybe we should go back.”

  “Too late.” Guy pulled her down in a slouch behind the dashboard. Lights flashed against the fogged-up windshield as a car drove past. Dannie cleared a spot with her fingertips, and peeked out. “Was that her?”

  “That was her.” Guy opened the door. “Let’s rock and roll.”

  Chapter Twelve

  THEY WENT AROUND TO the back of the house, dodging decorative land mines—a shiny ball on a pedestal, whirligigs, ceramic bunnies.

  A koi pond gurgled at the edge of a small concrete slab that apparently served as a patio, on which two white plastic chairs sat.

  Guy fumbled with the key, opening a door that entered on a small kitchen. A plastic night-light glowed on the wall beneath the cabinets. Even in the dim light, Dannie could see the harvest-gold appliances and gold-flecked Formica countertops of her youth.

  The kitchen bore the smell of sauerkraut. Or rather, it secreted the smell, which seemed as if it had been steeped into the dark paneling and worn linoleum floor.

  Guy switched on a light, turning the dimmer as low as it could go. In the corner of a kitchenette sat brown vinyl-covered chairs and a fake wood table piled high with mail, circulars, newspapers, coupons and other detritus.

  “That’s where I saw the package,” Guy said. “Maybe we should go through these piles.”

  Go through someone’s private stuff? It just felt wrong. But Dannie was desperate to find out what was going on. Or rather, desperate to fix it. And if she had to shuffle through some lady’s junk mail to do it, then that’s what she’d do.

  “I’ll take the table—you take the rest of the house,” she said. “You know the place. Where she’d be most likely to keep things.”

  “Right.” Guy pulled a penlight out of his pocket before disappearing into the living area, which was separated from the kitchen by a half wall topped with a wrought-iron trellis that went up to the ceiling.

  Dannie picked through the piles of paper, taking care not to disrupt things too much. As if anyone would possibly notice.

  A heap of Parade magazines held no interest. Nor did a teetering mountain of coupons, most of which had expired. But the stack of telephone bills did.

  She picked the pile carefully off the table and shuffled through the bills, skimming all the long-distance charges for foreign phone numbers.

  In a phone bill from January, three weeks before Roger had died, there were several calls to one number in Costa Rica. The following month, February, included half a dozen calls to a number in Cuatro Blanco.

  Dannie pulled a small notebook and pen out of the pocket of her jacket and jotted down the numbers in Costa Rica and Cuatro Blanco. Then she moved on to the credit card bills.

  After nearly fifteen minutes of searching, she could find nothing else that definitively linked Rose Hoffstetter to Cuatro Blanco. She was just about to go looking for Guy when she heard him calling her from upstairs.

  She followed the sound of his voice, feeling her way through the dark until she discovered a flimsy railing that creaked beneath her hand as she made her way up the steps. A light shone from the back bedroom, illuminating the upstairs hall.

  The first bedroom she passed was done up in pink gingham, with white furniture and about a hundred teddy bears on the bed, all staring out at her with little black plastic eyes.

  The second room was, apparently, a television room, with a TV set and an old VCR on a stand, and a love seat pushed against the far wall.

  Guy stuck his head out of the last bedroom, motioning to her.

  “Did you find something
?” she asked from the doorway.

  “Maybe. And I need you to check something for me.”

  “What?”

  “Her underwear drawer.”

  Dannie held up a hand and backed away. “No way.”

  “Come on. I can’t do it,” Guy said. “I can’t. She’s my mother-in-law, for chrissake.”

  “I can’t do it! I don’t even know her!”

  Guy gave her a look. “Does that even matter? You went through her mail.” He slid the top drawer open. “C’mon. Just do it.”

  Dannie suppressed a shudder. She stuck her hand into the drawer, touching something that had an awful lot of elastic. A bra, maybe. Or a girdle. “Ugh.”

  She pushed her hand around a bit more, looking for anything that felt as if it wasn’t an undergarment. And then she felt it. Something long and bumpy and definitely rubbery…

  “Oh, dear God.” She whipped her hand out of the drawer and slammed it shut.

  “What?” Guy said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you find something?”

  “Shut up! I don’t want to talk about it! Let’s just get out of here.”

  Guy’s gaze lingered on the drawer. “What was it?”

  “Trust me, you don’t want to know.” She grabbed his hand and dragged him from the room, throwing the light switch as she went.

  They descended the stairs in darkness, and were heading for the dim light of the kitchen when they heard the knob on the back door rattle. They hunkered down in the shadow of the staircase, watching the door through the railing.

  A woman Dannie could only assume was Rose came through the door, a bag from Royer’s Pharmacy in one hand, her keys in the other. The cat that had been in the front window jumped up on one of the kitchen chairs and meowed loudly. Rose patted the cat on the head.

  “Snickerdoodle! I could have sworn I turned this light out when I left.” Her voice was raspy. She coughed a loud, hacking cough. The cat took off.

  Rose puttered around the kitchen for a few minutes in her coat and hat, fishing a bottle of pills from the pharmacy bag, running a glass of water.

  Dannie grabbed Guy’s arm. “What do we do?” she whispered.